This invention concerns body coverings and in particular hand coverings and in particular gloves, of a type worn to keep the hands including the fingers and thumb warm in cold weather.
Baseball players in particular need to keep their fingers and thumbs warm when batting and often wear unheated gloves when at bat, which also improves the grip.
Keeping the hands warm has long been a problem since they are largely separated from the main body mass which generates body heat.
The fingers and thumb in particular are vulnerable to cold since they are relatively thin despite wearing gloves.
Mittens are warmer since the fingers are next to each other but prevent the separate use of the fingers for carrying out some manipulation.
Keeping the hands warm using heating packs inserted in a pocket sewn into the gloves have thus long been in use.
Heating packs typically contain materials react to give off heat after being exposed to the air to be energized, which heat production typically continues for several hours.
This has alleviated the problem for skiers and others engaged in cold weather sports or other activities.
However, the fingers and thumb are remote from the heating packs and generally may still become cold.
Electrical heating elements powered by batteries have been developed for body coverings such as gloves and jackets which have enabled distribution of heat to every area of the body, but batteries are bulky and expensive and may not last for extended periods. Thus the problem of keeping the fingers and thumb or the hand warm has not been completely solved by this approach.
It is an object of the present invention to provide heated hand gloves which does not require batteries but distributes heat to the fingers and thumb of a wearer to keep them warm.